Difficulty in integrating and supporting Monero

Question

Is integrating and supporting Monero more difficult for exchanges and merchants than supporting currencies based on the Bitcoin codebase?

Other than a relative lack of familiarity with the CryptoNote codebase and the need to ask customers to use a separate address and payment ID (before integrated addresses became available) are there any technical reasons to justify the view that Monero is more difficult to support than Litecoin (or another popular coin based on the Bitcoin codebase) for example?

Answer 1

Yes, there are further reasons.

For instance, Monero RPC does not have equivalents of events for new block or transaction received. This means one has to poll (though this is not overly complicated, see eg https://github.com/tippero/python-monero/ for an example).

There is also the fact that the node and wallet are separate binaries. Also, RPC is unauthenticated and unencrypted. This may be a problem if some are already using RPC across machines (not recommended, but still).

Last, there are some bits and pieces that could be better, like this or that RPC could be returning also this bit of info, or in this format, etc. These are the things that become apparent with usage. Some are fixed already, and more will be fixed as feedback is made.

All of these (or pretty much all of them, I think) will be fixed once the 0MQ branch is merged.

In the past, the main issue was the inordinate RAM usage, but this got fixed by the switch to LMDB.